I've written before about Digitiser's history with the Amiga. Indeed, it's one of the first things that comes up whenever I'm interviewed. In short: Digi didn't cover the Amiga initially. Amiga owners complained in their thousands. We relented and got our bosses to buy us an Amiga, but we continued to grumble bitterly, and then - when the Amiga did go under - we gloated and continued to troll Amiga owners, because it was funny.

Thing is, when we started writing Digi, we had nothing against the Amiga or Amiga owners. I mean, why would we? What sort of lunatic would hate a computer?! How broken would you have to be to launch a vendetta against a computer and its entire user base?!

I mean, to be honest I even regretted that I'd chosen the Atari ST over the Amiga. It had probably been down to some latent loyalty from owning an Atari 2600 years before, but it soon became clear to me which system had the best games catalogue.

Regardless, we didn't see the Amiga as a priority. Anyone could see that the games industry was moving towards a PC/console-centric place, and the Amiga had been knocking around in one form or another since the mid-80s.

Unfortunately, pointing that out didn't stop Amiga owners from hating us, and it didn't stop us trolling them, and that certainly didn't stop Amiga owners telling us we had an obligation to cover the Amiga, and complaining about us to our bosses and television watchdogs, and trying to get us sacked.

I never understood it. If they wanted Amiga reviews there were plenty of magazines they could go to! Were these people also writing complaints to, I dunno, Mean Machines and Super Play?! Why us?!

AP ESCAPEEEven as late as 2001, the Amiga owners were still having a go.

Here's a quote from long-defunct website Amiga History, discussing Amiga Power: "Its influence can still be seen in PC Zone and the Teletext computer pages, Digitizer (although the latter simply mimics AP style without actually being funny). Perhaps in some form the values that Amiga Power represented has been transplanted to a new generation of titles."​Firstly, it's Digitiser not Digitizer. Secondly, none of us ever read Amiga Power. Great magazine, apparently, but we weren't Amiga owners... so why would we have ever read Amiga Power? They didn't think that through. More likely, AP and Digi both had a common ancestor in the form of Your Sinclair. So, get it right: we actually mimicked Your Sinclair without actually being funny.

But anyhow...

Fact is, we got letters from disgruntled Sega fans, Nintendo fans, Jaguar owners... basically, we upset every single category of gamer at one time or another, but no group was ever more aggressive or driven, passionate and spiteful than the Amiga owners.

If you'd been on the receiving end of their ire to the degree that we had been, it's unlikely you would have bowed your head and gone"You know what? You guys are all great, and you've asked us so nicely, that from now on we're going to give you exactly what you want."

CAMPBELL'S SUPER TROLLINGOf course, Digi had a former Amiga Power writer as one of our star columnists. You might've expected the inclusion of Stuart Campbell on our pages would curry favour with the Amiga fraternity. Unfortunately, Stuart being Stuart... he was, if anything, worse than we were when it came to poking the Amiga hornets nest.

​Stuart recently stumbled upon one of the aforementioned complaints that got sent to our employer, and sent it across to me. I hadn't seen it in decades, but remembered it well.

It appeared on an Amiga message board in 1997, and had space beneath it for other Amiga owners to sign their names. I've redacted the name of the original author, but it's such a work of art, so utterly, beautifully, deluded, that I thought I'd share it with you.

This is what we had to deal with - for years...

"FTAO : Digitiser@Teletext

Sir/Madam, I write to complain bitterly about the violent attack on Amiga owners recently in Digitiser.

I have been an Amiga owner for many years, and I am deeply insulted by the malicious and untrue assertions made in that publication.

On page 171, Stuart Campbell writes : "The survey revealed via AF and CU Amiga, the perhaps not at all surprising fact that almost 68% of all Amiga owners have never had a girlfriend. Ever."

After pointing out that Amiga means "Girlfriend" in Spanish, he then goes on to say: "One can only imagine that the original management of Commodore were playing a funny practical joke on all the people who would buy their computer. So little change there, then."

This is outrageous. Even if the survey results are not, as I suspect, "cooked" to make some kind of frivolous point, I take great exception to the suggestion that I have been "ripped-off" by buying my Amiga.

On the contrary. Having used all manner of systems, from UNIX/VAX workstations to Sinclair ZX80's and everything in between, I can say with some certainty ( based on many years experience ) that no other computer system even comes close to the ease and power of the Amiga. And yes, I have had PLENTY of girlfriends, and none of them were made in a factory!

On page 175, an unknown author writes in GameSpotting: "GAMER TYPE 5 : AMIGA OWNER - He buys shareware because that's practically all there is to play on his Amiga, he writes his own programs, though they're rarely anything more interesting than a Spreadsheet, and he's possibly the most tedious, anally retentive individual on earth.

"He so wants you to believe that the Amiga is a viable gaming platform. A cliche, yes, but unfortunately, this archetypal computer nerd really does exist. We know this for definite. An Amiga owner's only friends are members of his coding club, and there's nothing he enjoys more than a 24 hour coding marathon. Locked away in his bedroom for days on end, his pale complexion, poor eyesight and unkempt appearance are clues to the average Amiga owner. He thinks multi-tasking is somehow a substitute for a catalogue of cutting-edge games. Did we mention he lacks a sense of irony? Typical quote : 'Yes, but the PC can't multitask.'"

To tackle these points one at a time:

(1) I don't have any shareware games. All my games are commercial, and there are PLENTY of them I can assure you. Not to mention games on the horizon which will make use of the PowerPC architecture and it's associated hardware.

(2) Yes I write my own programs because, unlike PC owners, I have the intelligence to do so. That is, after all the whole POINT of buying a computer. There are much cheaper ways of pursuing the childish activity of playing games.

(3) If the author takes a look at Aminet now and then, he will see that Spreadsheets account for a microscopic fraction of the sowftware in the archive.

(4) Tedious ? News to me ! Also news to the dozens of party goers who invariable come round my house every other night.

(5) Anally Retentive ? No I am not the kind of person who becomes incensed if everything is not in it's place / as it should be. If anything, I would describe my life as 'utter chaos' at the moment.

(6) The Amiga is, has been, and will continue to be a considerably MORE VIABLE gaming platform than the PC. The PC is, after all, fundamentally based on a prehistoric hardware/software architecture originally designed for "anal-retentives" to run their spreadsheets on.

(7) I am neither a Cliche, nor a Nerd. I am a 29 year old offshore worker who has been known to physically dismember people for saying less insulting things to me than the authors in Digitiser.

(8) I am not in a coding club as such, but if I were, I would be proud to count its members among my friends. At least they are the type of people who actually USE their computers once they buy them, unlike the majority of PC owners that I know - who simply buy a PC for the prestige; don't have a clue what to do with it; let it sit in the box for a month before unpacking it; unpack it then spend the best part of a year trying to get it to work properly; give up and eventually just let it sit in the spare room as a 'showpiece' statement that says ... 'look I'm clever enough to spend two grand on something useless.'

(9) There's only two things I do in my bedroom, and neither of them has anything to do with the computer. Isn't it typical of a PC owner to associate his PC with the bedroom. Symptomatic of all those hours on www.pornbyus.com or www.xtc.com. My complexion is not pale nor am I unkempt, in fact I spend a small fortune on clothes. You must be confusing me with PC owners who, having blown all their money on something that looks like an air conditioning unit ( and serves as much use ) they have no money left for 'luxuries' like clothes. And you have the audacity to call Amiga users 'nerds'.

(10) The Amiga multi-tasks properly. The PC doesn't. Period. There isn't really much more to say. As for us believing that the Amiga's ability to pre-emtively multitask easily is a substitute for 'cutting-edge' games, I've never heard such rubbish. The Amiga invented the concept of 'cutting-edge games', and now the best the PC can do is come up with some raytraced animations ( which were probably done on SGI's not PC's ) and slap them together and call it a game. Crap. At least Amiga games are fun, and will in the near future provide the same level of mindless '3D-ness' that every technophobic, first-time -buying, lame PC owner seems to want these days.

(11) I do have a sense of irony, otherwise I wouldn't be able to appreciate the fact that even though the Amiga has always been fundamentally superior to the PC it has been largely ignored by the large corporations due to dubious backhander operations - ( mainly involving Intel and Microsoft ) - and the subsequent ( and equally dubious ) marketing decisions by those same corporations. This resulted in the Amiga being left at the bottom end of the market and eventually slipping away on .... I've lost count .... is it 3 occasions now ? only to rise like a Phoenix on each occasion.

I think the comments made on Digitiser p175 on Sunday the 10th of August 1997 were libelous, inflammatory, and deeply insulting, and I intend taking further action with the ITC. The following is a list of names, ( with optional comments ), collected from various Amiga enthusiast around the world, who have all read this letter, and feel as strongly as I do."

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I love the "To tackle these points one at a time" section! Point 7 is particularly good.

They are genuinely angered to the point of total rage!

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Clive Peppard

1/3/2018 09:07:01 am

I had an Amiga. After reading that I need to invent a time machine, go back to 1988 and beg my dad to buy me anything else.

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RichardM

1/3/2018 09:18:48 am

Wow... Just stunning. I wonder how many signatures it attracted?

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Chris Bell

1/3/2018 09:21:14 am

Wow. I love that he’s so defensive that he contradicts his own points at times. I remember the raging war on the Digi letters page, and that was clearly only the first atom of the tip of the iceberg. To think people like this were actually out in the world. I wonder how they feel about it all now?

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Nick

1/3/2018 09:37:24 am

Wow! I wish I was one of the dozens of party goers round his house.

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Voodoo76

1/3/2018 12:40:06 pm

They were usually great but one time I took a bottle of Pepsi as the shop didn't have any Coke. As soon as I arrived I was stabbed in the face.

I always wanted an Amiga and never got one. NOW I AM GLAD. Even though I got some Amstrad thing instead.

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD

1/3/2018 11:58:41 am

I frequented a few Amiga newsgroups in the 90s. These people were deadly serious, and had no self-awareness whatsoever.

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD

1/3/2018 12:02:02 pm

This was supposed to be in reply to DEAN's comment below. Posting from this Amiga browser makes it a bit hard (I'm kidding, I sold mine years ago).

DEAN

1/3/2018 10:07:42 am

I had an Amiga and I thought it was awesome but yeah, that letter reads to me like somebody had a lot of fun writing it. Don't believe they were angry at all actually because there's too much evidence of a sense of humour.

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DEAN

1/3/2018 12:14:46 pm

I don't know what to do - do I reply here as you intended or from where you left off.... you're killing me, Dr!

Okay, so what you're saying is that you're highly doubtful it was feigned indignation by the author.... Perhaps you're right but it's like something one of us would pen if were taking the piss, right? It's TOO perfect.

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Mrtankthreat

1/3/2018 01:33:09 pm

That was my thought Dean. It's similar to what I was saying the other say about trying to get the tone right so that it doesn't just come off as pure anger. Like how I felt I hadn't made it as clear I'd like, I don't think the evidence of sense of humour here is as obvious as you but I do suspect that's what they were going for.

DEAN

1/3/2018 04:44:25 pm

I know what you're saying. That explains why people use emoticons so often but for me they can rob a thing - sometimes dry and subtle is brilliant and then along comes Mr Winky (matron) and ruins everything.

For me the expressiveness in the piece sounds like AAA "joker" - it's all over the thing and starts as it means to go on -

"I write to complain BITTERLY about the VIOLENT attack on Amiga owners"

Does that sound serious to you? It's practically Monty Python.

Mrtankthreat

1/3/2018 07:37:16 pm

It's kinda like Poe's law isn't it? I couldn't rule it out that it's genuine but either way it's funny. The difference is are we laughing with them or at them. Laughing with them would be nicer and charitable but laughing at them is probably more fun.

Noc

1/3/2018 10:14:02 am

Can we track him down for a “where are they now” interview please? We could keep it anonymous but I’d be intrigued to find out how the past 21 years have gone for this guy. How long did he keep the Amiga dream alive and what system’s mast has he tied his flag to now? I’m guessing he bought a Saturn, a Dremcast and an Ngage.

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Paul

1/3/2018 10:26:56 am

The computer guy at Uni (the one actually running the computer imagery courses) seemed to be a keen Amiga person. There were quite a few of them about, and he was quite keen to point out that all the effects in Babylon 5 were done on Amigas. Mind you, this was the time when B5 S1 was being for the first time here, so it wasn’t the tedious argument that it’s since become.

My favourite thing about the Amiga was the screen mode called HAM (short for “Hold And Modify”) just because it sounded like cured pig meat. The most pretentious thing in computing I have ever seen is the Amiga’s “Guru Meditation” which popped up every time the machine crashed, which seemed to be quite often.

Yeah, but not as often as the Blue Screen Of Death on Windows, amiright?

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Dan Whitehead

1/3/2018 11:08:14 am

I DEFINITELY have a girlfriend but she lives in Canada so that's why you can't meet her but I have DEFINITELY had sex in her vagina when she visited in the school holiday but you didn't see her then either.

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Mrtankthreat

1/3/2018 01:37:17 pm

You're going out with her as well? Bloody two timing bitch.

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Treacle

1/3/2018 04:33:23 pm

Hang on a minute! If she's a supermodel and drove from Canada in her Lamborghini then I think she's cheating on me too, the three timing Canuck.

Toily Toilet

1/3/2018 11:13:53 am

I had and amiga and when i saw this headline it made me feel warm and oily to be ranked among the worst people of all time. Sadly it would be dishonest for me to claim to be as bad this bad man.

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Nikki

1/3/2018 11:34:25 am

The effects on Babylon 5 weren't done on amigas anyway.

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Karpow

9/3/2018 02:05:53 pm

Please, check your facts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXmSA18cfgA

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD

1/3/2018 11:44:28 am

As I've commented previously, I was an absurdly diehard Amiga user, and didn't even own a Windows PC until the space year 2000. And for the latter half of the 90s I wasn't even all that interested in playing games. And yet, I still loved Digitiser, though my faith was sorely tested at times.

It's hard to explain the devotion without coming across like a cultist -
and how unjust it felt as the Amiga was sold off from one incompetent owner to the next, all the while we were being mocked for advocating the literally best computer ever made (this is not up for debate). I mean, weren't people supposed to be getting behind the underdogs? I always felt there was an anti-establishment spirit in the Amiga community, an attitude that has stayed with me to this day. Back then, Bill Gates was Satan, and he was slowly corrupting our fun little hobby for profit. We live in a completely different world now. I'm agnostic about computer and console platforms, because the only and inevitable winner was the corporations and capitalists. I just view it all with a weary feeling resignation now.

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Neptunium

1/3/2018 12:25:04 pm

"It's hard to explain the devotion without coming across like a cultist"

I don't think it's too hard. The humble Amiga put the power of a decent PC with a raft of extras (sound & graphics cards) in your bedroom for a fraction of the price. The operating system, especially, was way ahead of it's time - yet was criminally ignored by most purchasers who just wanted to play games.

Unfortunately, the user base started to become deluded in the late 90's. The PC's were coming cheaper and bundled with hardware which gave better graphics/sound performance than even the top of the range Amigas. Commodore hadn't invested in the hardware since the AGA chipset. Clinging to "but we still have pre-emptive multitasking" and the glimmer of hope from the latest lies from whatever entity had swallowed up Commodore's patents that month had become the Amiga fan's safe place.

I feel sad that we'll never have another seismic shift in our lifetime like the one from the 8-bits to the Amiga/ST. Now even the cheapest landfill Android phone can produce Babylon 5 quality graphics in realtime. Kids will never understand how amazing it was to watch demos on the 16-bit machines, dreaming about owning something so powerful.

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Phat Angus

1/3/2018 10:02:01 pm

Nicely put. Where previous home computers had seemed like a signpost towards the future, the Amiga was like an actual piece of the future had somehow fallen into our laps.

It also had a whole edgy, creative indie subculture, was pioneering in what we'd now call the open source movement, and even had its own excellent characterful creation backstory/mythology.

For all this to then lose out to the dreary, beige corporate-managerial IBM PC, was like the Empire actually defeating the Rebel Alliance. Hard to take for all those involved. So not surprising many of them took it badly.

In summary, yeah it was a cult, but it created all those cultists because it was so fuckin' awesome.

The worst thing being, of course, that the Empire won not because they had the best guns, but because the Rebels had such bloody incompetent leaders.

RG

1/3/2018 11:55:07 am

Hahaha, that's funny. A friend of mine had an Amiga that I was jealous of. He got very upset when I said that Zool was rubbish...

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Biscuits

1/3/2018 12:19:40 pm

We quite liked Zool, except one kid (who strangely was the Amiga kid). Bizarrely, he really got in a huff about the fact we liked it and he didn't. We went into the locker room to discover he had left a hand drawn picture of Zool with stink lines, which he had titled 'Pool'. We pointed out his error and he started rage-crying and took the picture away. Later, there was the same image, now titled 'Poo-l'.

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MrDrinks

4/3/2018 03:42:17 pm

I love this story.

superfog

1/3/2018 12:20:22 pm

As a former Amiga owner I think Campbell's description was pretty accurate, for me at least...

Girlfriends? Pffft, once I programmed the Amiga to speak out the names of my favorite young ladies that appeared on a particular page of a particular rag, the intention was to have it speaking all night on a loop so as to have the best dreams ever...

All dreamt of was being chased by a mob of angry robots, STILL A WIN I might add.

Sigh, happy days!

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Brek Martin

1/3/2018 12:24:09 pm

Only Amiga makes it possible!

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@purplephlebas

1/3/2018 12:27:50 pm

Slightly surprised no has raised Babylon 5 being done on an Amiga. Or that Atari ST means "accomplished lover" in greek.

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Wrist Flapper

1/3/2018 01:06:59 pm

Thanks for removing my name from the letter Biffles.

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Alastair

1/3/2018 02:15:33 pm

To be fair to him I remember renting a teeny room in the loft of a house that was small with to be heated by my PC and CRT monitor in the winter time.

Sadly I didn't think to go anywhere with the idea; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530072-800-the-computer-that-crunches-cloud-data-to-heat-your-home/

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Adam

1/3/2018 02:42:50 pm

I like the fact that, at the end of the letter where Amiga-nerds once signed their names, we now sign up for info on the Digi TV show.

Could one of you fine chap please give me a brief description of the Amiga’s multi-tasking powers. Why the PC couldn’t do it, and why it matters please?
I’ve been hearing about it for 25 years now, and am still none the wiser.

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AMIGA OWNER

1/3/2018 07:58:01 pm

Yeah, so basically, the Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking, and the PC didn't. HTH.

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Regular John

1/3/2018 08:18:20 pm

I see. I feel a bit foolish for asking now. Kinda self explanatory if I actually thought about it. Cheers.

Phat Angus

1/3/2018 10:14:58 pm

Basically, PC multitasking worked by giving the car keys to App #1, and asking it to bring the car back in 30 minutes so the next app could have a go. If the app decided not to come back, or drove the car off the edge of a cliff, you were screwed, and had to reboot the PC to get the car back and start again.

The Amiga did it like a taxi driver, driving App #1 around for 30 mins, then #2, and so on. If an app misbehaved, or wanted to stay out past its allotted time, the Amiga could chuck them out of the cab, and keep going with everyone else.

So if you wanted a lift to the station at 8am, and they both said "yeah I can do that mate", you can see why the second approach would be hella more reliable.

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Neptunium

2/3/2018 09:01:47 am

So... During the early 90's PC's mainly ran on MS DOS and sometimes Windows was installed on top of that. DOS didn't really support multitasking - one program ran at a time. There were various tricks within DOS extenders and Windows itself that provided the illusion of multiple programs running at once, but they weren't all running next to one another with the CPU time proportioned nicely.

AmigaOS was built with multitasking in mind. So all of those millions of A500's littered around the countries bedrooms could run as many programs simultaneously and the CPU time would be split nicely between the different tasks. Just like the expensive Unix machines people were using in universities.

However the PC hardware of the era was more than capable, it's just that Microsoft wasn't. That was until Windows 95 which would multitask just as well as an Amiga (and I mean that - AmigaOS whilst ahead of it's time shared some issues with Windows 95 - particularly that one rogue program could quite happily bring down the whole system). As soon was Win95 was released the argument flipped from "PC doesn't have preemptive multitasking" to "boring, we've had that for years with much cheaper/weaker hardware".

The reason Amiga fans were so bitter is that their platform had most of these ideas working and implemented years before the competition, yet it was always dismissed as "another gaming platform".

Incidentally DirectX was born out of somebody at Microsoft being disappointed with the graphical capabilities of Windows 95 not living up to the hype, and trying to create an Amiga-like graphics library. This went on to also become the DirectX Box, or XBox, SO YOU HAVE THE AMIGA TO THANK FOR YOUR XBOX YOU WORTHLESS GATES LOVERS. Ahem. Got a bit carried away there.

ChorltonWheelie

1/3/2018 08:21:25 pm

Sounds almost exactly like the modern Apple Mac users I have to endure.
You've a Mac haven't you Paul.

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Chris

2/3/2018 08:47:15 pm

I had a friend in the late 90s just like this. Still clinging to his Amiga 600 while everyone else had a PC. One day he physically stopped me leaving his (parent's) house until I said out loud that Amigas were able to play games like Virtua Cop.